It's now apparent from this transcript that Gosling's error was over-generalization: he's lumping "all of these dynamic languages" together and making incredibly un-provable statements about them as a whole. That's a good way to get your comments eternalized by angry blog-rebuttals for weeks on end, but it's not a good way to evangelize your language or tout its strengths.
In addition to shedding light on these mysterious comments by Gosling, I'm happy to see this transcript for another reason. It contains an excerpt that really sums up why I was glad to get out of Java and into Ruby (here I go, taking things out of context!): "On the one hand we really need simplicity, and on the other hand we really need power. And those are evil twin brothers of each other." There it is. The archetypal tenet of the Java philosophy: power necessitates complexity! Yuck! I couldn't disagree more with that philosophy. After having worked in Java for the past few years before coming to ruby, I can attest to how pervasive this philosophy is in the language itself. It makes me sad, though, to think of all those people still living in the Java box, dreaming up good ideas that they're throwing out because they're too simple to be powerful... Come to ruby, where simple is beautiful!
March 28th, 2006 at 07:54 PM It seems like most interesting ideas are simple at the surface, but as you diver deeper they get mucky like everything else. E=MC^2 is pretty damn gorgeous, and although its useful in that form you aren't really going to be getting down with Einstein until you realize that "mass is only one of many possible manifestations of energy." (Check out what these guys say: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/experts.html) How about evolution, Eulers formula
March 29th, 2006 at 03:05 AM Jeff, are you the Swiss Monkey?